Spatial Reasoning
Spatial-Temporal Super-Resolution of Satellite Imagery via Conditional Pixel Synthesis
He, Yutong, Wang, Dingjie, Lai, Nicholas, Zhang, William, Meng, Chenlin, Burke, Marshall, Lobell, David B., Ermon, Stefano
High-resolution satellite imagery has proven useful for a broad range of tasks, including measurement of global human population, local economic livelihoods, and biodiversity, among many others. Unfortunately, high-resolution imagery is both infrequently collected and expensive to purchase, making it hard to efficiently and effectively scale these downstream tasks over both time and space. We propose a new conditional pixel synthesis model that uses abundant, low-cost, low-resolution imagery to generate accurate high-resolution imagery at locations and times in which it is unavailable. We show that our model attains photo-realistic sample quality and outperforms competing baselines on a key downstream task -- object counting -- particularly in geographic locations where conditions on the ground are changing rapidly.
Outlier Detection and Spatial Analysis Algorithms
Outlier detection is a significant area in data mining. It can be either used to pre-process the data prior to an analysis or post the processing phase (before visualization) depending on the effectiveness of the outlier and its importance. Outlier detection extends to several fields such as detection of credit card fraud, network intrusions, machine failure prediction, potential terrorist attacks, and so on. Outliers are those data points with characteristics considerably different. They deviate from the data set causing inconsistencies, noise and anomalies during analysis and result in modification of the original points However, a common misconception is that outliers have to be immediately eliminated or replaced from the data set. Such points could be considered useful if analyzed separately as they could be obtained from a separate mechanism entirely making it important to the research question. This study surveys the different methods of outlier detection for spatial analysis. Spatial data or geospatial data are those that exhibit geographic properties or attributes such as position or areas. An example would be weather data such as precipitation, temperature, wind velocity, and so on collected for a defined region.
A Dynamic Spatial-temporal Attention Network for Early Anticipation of Traffic Accidents
Karim, Muhammad Monjurul, Li, Yu, Qin, Ruwen, Yin, Zhaozheng
Recently, autonomous vehicles and those equipped with an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) are emerging. They share the road with regular ones operated by human drivers entirely. To ensure guaranteed safety for passengers and other road users, it becomes essential for autonomous vehicles and ADAS to anticipate traffic accidents from natural driving scenes. The dynamic spatial-temporal interaction of the traffic agents is complex, and visual cues for predicting a future accident are embedded deeply in dashcam video data. Therefore, early anticipation of traffic accidents remains a challenge. To this end, the paper presents a dynamic spatial-temporal attention (DSTA) network for early anticipation of traffic accidents from dashcam videos. The proposed DSTA-network learns to select discriminative temporal segments of a video sequence with a module named Dynamic Temporal Attention (DTA). It also learns to focus on the informative spatial regions of frames with another module named Dynamic Spatial Attention (DSA). The spatial-temporal relational features of accidents, along with scene appearance features, are learned jointly with a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) network. The experimental evaluation of the DSTA-network on two benchmark datasets confirms that it has exceeded the state-of-the-art performance. A thorough ablation study evaluates the contributions of individual components of the DSTA-network, revealing how the network achieves such performance. Furthermore, this paper proposes a new strategy that fuses the prediction scores from two complementary models and verifies its effectiveness in further boosting the performance of early accident anticipation.
Spatial Analysis & Geospatial Data Science in Python
Geospatial data science is a subset of data science that focuses on spatial data and its unique techniques. In this, we are going to perform spatial analysis and trying to find insights from spatial data. In this course, we lay the foundation for a career in Geospatial Data Science. You will get hands-on Geopy, Plotly etc.. the workhorse of Geospatial data science Python libraries. The topics covered in this course widely touch on some of the most used spatial technique in Geospatial data science.
A Markov Reward Process-Based Approach to Spatial Interpolation
The interpolation of spatial data can be of tremendous value in various applications, such as forecasting weather from only a few measurements of meteorological or remote sensing data. Existing methods for spatial interpolation, such as variants of kriging and spatial autoregressive models, tend to suffer from at least one of the following limitations: (a) the assumption of stationarity, (b) the assumption of isotropy, and (c) the trade-off between modelling local or global spatial interaction. Addressing these issues in this work, we propose the use of Markov reward processes (MRPs) as a spatial interpolation method, and we introduce three variants thereof: (i) a basic static discount MRP (SD-MRP), (ii) an accurate but mostly theoretical optimised MRP (O-MRP), and (iii) a transferable weight prediction MRP (WP-MRP). All variants of MRP interpolation operate locally, while also implicitly accounting for global spatial relationships in the entire system through recursion. Additionally, O-MRP and WP-MRP no longer assume stationarity and are robust to anisotropy. We evaluated our proposed methods by comparing the mean absolute errors of their interpolated grid cells to those of 7 common baselines, selected from models based on spatial autocorrelation, (spatial) regression, and deep learning. We performed detailed evaluations on two publicly available datasets (local GDP values, and COVID-19 patient trajectory data). The results from these experiments clearly show the competitive advantage of MRP interpolation, which achieved significantly lower errors than the existing methods in 23 out of 40 experimental conditions, or 35 out of 40 when including O-MRP.
GIS, Mapping, and Spatial Analysis Specialization
Learn the concepts, tools, and techniques to make great maps that answer geographic questions. This Specialization is for those new to mapping and GIS, as well as anyone looking to gain a better understanding of how it all works and why. You will learn practical skills that can be applied to your own work using cutting-edge software created by Esri Inc., the world's leading GIS company and our industry partner. PLEASE NOTE: THE SOFTWARE IS NO LONGER PROVIDED WITH THIS COURSE. The courses are based on the idea that you will get the most out of the learning experience if you can tailor your work to your own interests.
Geospatial Analyses & Remote Sensing : from Beginner to Pro
Description Geospatial Data Analyses & Remote Sensing: 5 Classes in 1 Do you need to design a GIS map or satellite-imagery based map for your Remote Sensing or GIS project but you don't know how to do this? Have you heard about Remote Sensing object-based image analysis and machine learning or maybe QGIS or Google Earth Engine but did not know where to start with such analyses? Do you find Remote Sensing and GIS manuals too not practical and looking for a course that takes you by hand, teach you all the concepts, and get you started on a real-life GIS mapping project? I'm very excited that you found my Practical Geospatial Masterclass on Geospatial Data Analyses & Remote Sensing. This course provides and information that is usually delivered in 4 separate Geospatial Data Analyses & Remote Sensing courses, and thus you with learning all the necessary information to start and advance with Geospatial analysis and includes more than 9 hours of video content, plenty of practical analysis, and downloadable materials.
Spatial-Temporal Dual Graph Neural Networks for Travel Time Estimation
Jin, Guangyin, Yan, Huan, Li, Fuxian, Huang, Jincai, Li, Yong
Travel time estimation is a basic but important part in intelligent transportation systems, especially widely applied in online map services to help travel navigation and route planning. Most previous works commonly model the road segments or intersections separately and obtain their spatial-temporal characteristics for travel time estimation. However, due to the continuous alternation of the road segments and intersections, the dynamic features of them are supposed to be coupled and interactive. Therefore, modeling one of them limits further improvement in accuracy of estimating travel time. To address the above problems, we propose a novel graph-based deep learning framework for travel time estimation, namely Spatial-Temporal Dual Graph Neural Networks (STDGNN). Specifically, we first establish the spatial-temporal dual graph architecture to capture the complex correlations of both intersections and road segments. The adjacency relations of intersections and that of road segments are respectively characterized by node-wise graph and edge-wise graph. In order to capture the joint spatial-temporal dynamics of the intersections and road segments, we adopt the spatial-temporal learning layer that incorporates the multi-scale spatial-temporal graph convolution networks and dual graph interaction networks. Followed by the spatial-temporal learning layer, we also employ the multi-task learning layer to estimate the travel time of a given whole route and each road segment simultaneously. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our proposed model on two real-world trajectory datasets, and the experimental results show that STDGNN significantly outperforms several state-of-art baselines.
Learning to Optimize Industry-Scale Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problems
Li, Xijun, Luo, Weilin, Yuan, Mingxuan, Wang, Jun, Lu, Jiawen, Wang, Jie, Lu, Jinhu, Zeng, Jia
The Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem (DPDP) is aimed at dynamically scheduling vehicles among multiple sites in order to minimize the cost when delivery orders are not known a priori. Although DPDP plays an important role in modern logistics and supply chain management, state-of-the-art DPDP algorithms are still limited on their solution quality and efficiency. In practice, they fail to provide a scalable solution as the numbers of vehicles and sites become large. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach, Spatial-Temporal Aided Double Deep Graph Network (ST-DDGN), to solve industry-scale DPDP. In our method, the delivery demands are first forecast using spatial-temporal prediction method, which guides the neural network to perceive spatial-temporal distribution of delivery demand when dispatching vehicles. Besides, the relationships of individuals such as vehicles are modelled by establishing a graph-based value function. ST-DDGN incorporates attention-based graph embedding with Double DQN (DDQN). As such, it can make the inference across vehicles more efficiently compared with traditional methods. Our method is entirely data driven and thus adaptive, i.e., the relational representation of adjacent vehicles can be learned and corrected by ST-DDGN from data periodically. We have conducted extensive experiments over real-world data to evaluate our solution. The results show that ST-DDGN reduces 11.27% number of the used vehicles and decreases 13.12% total transportation cost on average over the strong baselines, including the heuristic algorithm deployed in our UAT (User Acceptance Test) environment and a variety of vanilla DRL methods. We are due to fully deploy our solution into our online logistics system and it is estimated that millions of USD logistics cost can be saved per year.
From parcel to continental scale -- A first European crop type map based on Sentinel-1 and LUCAS Copernicus in-situ observations
d'Andrimont, Raphaël, Verhegghen, Astrid, Lemoine, Guido, Kempeneers, Pieter, Meroni, Michele, van der Velde, Marijn
Detailed parcel-level crop type mapping for the whole European Union (EU) is necessary for the evaluation of agricultural policies. The Copernicus program, and Sentinel-1 (S1) in particular, offers the opportunity to monitor agricultural land at a continental scale and in a timely manner. However, so far the potential of S1 has not been explored at such a scale. Capitalizing on the unique LUCAS 2018 Copernicus in-situ survey, we present the first continental crop type map at 10-m spatial resolution for the EU based on S1A and S1B Synthetic Aperture Radar observations for the year 2018. Random forest classification algorithms are tuned to detect 19 different crop types. We assess the accuracy of this EU crop map with three approaches. First, the accuracy is assessed with independent LUCAS core in-situ observations over the continent. Second, an accuracy assessment is done specifically for main crop types from farmers declarations from 6 EU member countries or regions totaling >3M parcels and 8.21 Mha. Finally, the crop areas derived by classification are compared to the subnational (NUTS 2) area statistics reported by Eurostat. The overall accuracy for the map is reported as 80.3% when grouping main crop classes and 76% when considering all 19 crop type classes separately. Highest accuracies are obtained for rape and turnip rape with user and produced accuracies higher than 96%. The correlation between the remotely sensed estimated and Eurostat reported crop area ranges from 0.93 (potatoes) to 0.99 (rape and turnip rape). Finally, we discuss how the framework presented here can underpin the operational delivery of in-season high-resolution based crop mapping.